A Safety and Liveness Theory for Total Reversibility (Extended Abstract)

TL;DR

This paper develops a formal theory of safety and liveness in a reversible calculus with totally ordered reductions, introducing models based on forward transitions and analyzing the impact on CCS systems.

Contribution

It provides the first characterizations of safety and liveness, and the first testing theory for a reversible calculus, with models based solely on forward transitions.

Findings

Total reversibility is a conservative extension to CCS for safety.

Adding reversibility distinguishes more systems in terms of liveness.

The developed models simplify refinement proofs for reversible systems.

Abstract

We study the theory of safety and liveness in a reversible calculus where reductions are totally ordered and rollbacks lead the systems to past states. Similar to previous work on communicating transactions, liveness and safety respectively correspond to the should-testing and inverse may-testing preorders. We develop fully abstract models for these preorders in a reversible calculus, which are based only on forward transitions, thus providing a simple proof technique for refinement of such systems. We show that with respect to safety, total reversibility is a conservative extension to CCS. With respect to liveness, however, adding total reversibility to CCS distinguishes more systems. To our knowledge, this work provides the first characterisations of safety and liveness, and the first testing theory for a reversible calculus.